Environmentalists are calling for an investigation into Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after another bizarre incident involving the handling of mammal remains has surfaced — this time a historic claim that he once cut off the head of a beached whale with a chainsaw and secured it to the roof of his car to take home.
The claim is not new; it was detailed in a story by his daughter, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, in a Town and Country magazine interview 12 years ago. She said at the time that the incident took place in 1994 on a family holiday in Massachusetts.
She alleged that her dad, pursuing his interest in studying animal skeletons and skulls, heard a dead animal had washed up onshore in Hyannis Port. He headed down to the shore and reportedly cut off the whale’s head with a chainsaw and then used bungee cords to secure it to the top of the family’s minivan to take it back to their home in New York.
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” she told the magazine, adding that the drive from Hyannis Port, Mass., to Mount Kisco, N.Y., would take about five hours.
“We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
The anecdote has angered the Center of Biological Diversity Action Fund (a group that’s endorsed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris for president of the United States), and the organization’s chief political strategist and government affairs director is now demanding an inquiry.
In a letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Brett Hartl claimed Kennedy’s alleged past actions may constitute a felony.
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“Mr. Kennedy’s apparent transport of the marine mammal skull from Massachusetts to New York, and therefore across state lines, also represented a felony violation of the Lacey Act, one of the earliest wildlife conservation laws enacted by (the) United States in 1900,” he wrote, adding that it was also illegal to possess part of any animal protected by the Endangered Species Act.
“Normally, an unverified anecdote would not provide sufficient evidence as the basis for conducting an investigation.”
If the whale story is true, Hartl argues that Kennedy may have violated 1972’s Marine Mammal Protection Act and 1973’s Endangered Species Act. The Lacey Act, a conservation law, prohibits the transportation of illegally gathered wildlife, dead or alive, across state lines.
Hartl also referenced a report from earlier this month, when Kennedy recounted a story to actor Roseanne Barr where he said he dumped a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park in 2014 and confessed that he tried to make it look like the animal was killed by an errant cyclist.
In the video, which captures Barr and Kennedy conversing in a kitchen, he said he found the dead bear and was planning to skin it and keep the meat in his fridge, but instead staged it as a bike accident in Manhattan’s biggest park.
“The (bear) story made it seem like this was normal behavior for him, so he may also possess additional illegally collected wildlife parts,” Hartl wrote.
In a followup interview with the New York Times, Hartl said that if Kennedy still has any part of the whale’s skeleton he could still be charged with a federal offence, despite it being 30 years later. He also noted that Kennedy is an environmental lawyer and his alleged actions go against his oath to the bar.
“When you swear into the bar … you take an oath to uphold the law. This isn’t a stupid rule. This is the law — laws that were passed almost unanimously,” decades ago, he said. “This is not some silly current thing of the ‘corrupt deep state’ that he now claims to care about.”
The whale anecdote resurfaced just days after Kennedy suspended his independent presidential campaign and has now thrown his support behind Donald Trump.
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